Chatter on Truth Social After Death of Alexei Navalny

TLDR

• The death of Alexei Navalny was announced by the Russian government on February 16, 2024. From there, online communities picked up the news story. 

• On February 19th, Donald Trump took to Truth Social to make a statement on Navalny, using the occasion to draw attention to issues in relation to US domestic politics. 

• Trump’s post appears to have kicked off a spike of interest in Navalny on the Truth Social platform, indicating that the former president’s activity may have a significant and identifiable impact on the conversation on the platform. 

• We looked at the top Navalny-related links shared on Truth Social around the time of his death and found that users most shared two links. The first is a conspiracy-laden news roundup-style video in which Navalny is called a Western intelligence asset. The second link is one in which Trump compares himself to Navalny because of his legal troubles; Trump himself shared this link on the site. 

Background

On February 16, 2024, the Russian government announced the death of Alexei Navalny, a prominent opposition leader and activist. Navalny died in Russian custody while serving out a multi-year prison sentence. Amnesty International had designated Navalny a prisoner of conscience and stated that he “[had] not been imprisoned for any recognizable crime.”1 Navalny’s death was confirmed by his spokesperson the following day. Navalny’s public funeral was held on March 1, 2024 and conducted under a heavy police presence.

Many Western governments have publicly indicated that they hold Russian president Vladimir Putin responsible for Navalny’s death. Western ambassadors and diplomats attended Navalny’s Moscow funeral with many world leaders making public statements to hold Putin to account.

Navalny’s career in activism and anti-government work spanned decades and included organizing major public protests against the regime, running for mayor of Moscow in 2013, and attempting to run in the 2018 presidential race. He was also the target of politically-motivated criminal investigations throughout his career and survived being poisoned – likely by the Russian government – in August 2020. In January 2021, Navalny returned to Russia where he was arrested. 

Following the news of Navalny’s death, many major US political figures released public statements sympathetic to the activist. On February 16, 2024, Joe Biden made a statement accusing Putin of being responsible for Navalny’s death and using the opportunity to call for additional funding for Ukraine.2 That same day, Speaker Mike Johnson claimed that Putin was “likely directly responsible” for Navalny’s death and highlighted the need to bolster security in Ukraine and the Baltic countries.3 Nikki Haley – still in the race for the Republican presidential nomination at the time – similarly blamed Putin for Navalny’s death and called attention to Donald Trump’s silence on the issue on February 17, 2024.4

Given Navalny’s prominence, the media attention on his death, and the highly political nature of issues involving Russia and Ukraine in the US, Open Measures researchers examined what the chatter about Navalny’s death looked like on the US-based site Truth Social. 

Analysis of Online Chatter 

Truth Social is a Twitter-esque microblogging site created by Trump Media & Technology Group. It is also one of the most recognizable of the major alt-tech platforms in the US landscape; according to a November 2022 poll by Pew research, 27% of Americans had heard of Truth Social.5 The platform has marketed itself as more supportive of free speech than other social media platforms, with less emphasis on moderation. As a result, a range of neo-Nazi and white nationalist accounts, as well as accounts launching disinformation campaigns, have been able to find an audience on the platform.

Donald Trump on Truth Social

The most prominent personality on Truth Social by far is Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump), with over 6 million followers. As indicated by Nikki Haley’s February 17 statement, Trump did not remark on Navalny’s death in the days immediately following the news. The presidential candidate’s first public statement on the incident was on February 19, 2024 – three days after the news of Navalny’s death first broke – in the form of a post on Truth Social. 

Caption: Post authored by Donald Trump regarding the death of Navalny, shown in the Open Measures platform

The full text of the post reads as follows: 

The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country. It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction. Open Borders, Rigged Elections, and Grossly Unfair Courtroom Decisions are DESTROYING AMERICA. WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION! MAGA2024

The post uses Navalny’s death as a lens to examine US domestic politics, mentioning specifically “Open Borders, Rigged Elections, and Grossly Unfair Courtroom Decisions”; these are likely references to the current migrant crisis, Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent, and the many court cases currently underway involving the former president. Notably, the post makes no mention of Putin and does not indicate who may be responsible for Navalny’s death. 

In addition to the post above, Trump has referenced Navalny’s death only one other time on the platform. On February 21, 2024, Trump shared a link to a story from Mediaite with the headline “Trump Calls $354 Million Fraud Fine Against Him ‘A Form of Navalny.’”

Overall Chatter about Navalny’s Death on Truth Social

Open Measures researchers were interested in understanding more about the general conversation on Truth Social about Alexei Navalny around the time of his death. To do this, we used Open Measures’ Truth Social dataset and examined data from the day before the announcement of Navalny’s death until March 4, 2024, a few days after Navanly’s public funeral. 

Chatter about Navalny appears to have had two primary peaks. The first was on February 16, 2024, the day Navalny’s death was announced by the Russian government; this was expected, as it would've been on any social media platform in the wake of a major, breaking news story.

Caption: Mentions of “Navalny” across Open Measures’ Truth Social dataset from February 15, 2024, to March 4, 2024. Over 14,000 posts were created mentioning Navalny during that time period

The second peak was on February 19, 2024, the same day that Donald Trump commented on Navalny’s death on Truth Social. We wanted to understand whether this spike in mentions about Navalny on February 19, 2024, was more closely correlated to Trump’s statement on the platform.

Trump left the post mentioned above on February 19, 2024, at 08:04 am EST. With this context, our researchers could situate the post against the general chatter around Alexei Navalny by examining mentions of Navalny on Truth Social from February 18, 2024 (the day before Trump’s post) to the end of the day on February 20, 2024 (the day after Trump’s post). In order to understand the impact of Trump’s tweet with more granularity, we configured the graph to return hourly activity levels. 

Caption: Image 3: Mentions of Navalny on Truth Social increase significantly from February 19, 2024 to February 20, 2024. Note that the X-axis shows time in UTC. 

There was a clear increase in activity mentioning Navalny starting around 08:00 AM (12:00 UTC) on February 19, 2024, the same time that Trump posted. This suggests that Trump’s activity on the platform may have been a powerful driver of conversation about Navalny. 

Caption: Mentions of Navalny on Truth Social increase significantly from February 19, 2024 to February 20, 2024. The Open Measures changepoint analysis tooling indicates the volume changed dramatically on February 19th at ~12:00 UTC (8:00AM EST)

After February 19, 2024, Navalny's mentions on the platform steadily declined, failing to noticeably increase even on March 1, 2024, the date of Navalny’s funeral. 

Top Individual Posters Talking about Navalny’s Death on Truth Social

For our investigation, we wanted to identify the users who most engaged with content related to Alexei Navalny on TruthSocial. For this, we consulted Open Measures’ Activity tool, which allows researchers to investigate which accounts are generating the most chatter about certain topics on various alt-tech platforms.

Using the Activity tool, our researchers examined which users on Truth Social most frequently used the term “Navalny” in their posts between February 15, 2024 and March 5, 2024. 

Caption: The top 10 accounts on Truth Social (with names redacted) who most used the term “Navalny” in their posts on Truth Social during the 15-day period of our investigation.

The top 10 posters mentioned Navalny a combined 450 times, with the account that posted about Navalny most frequently mentioning Navalny 64 times in the 15-day period we examined. (This data includes individuals who were “retruthing," the Truth Social term for "retweeting," information about Navalny.)

We were also interested in identifying the top accounts generating unique posts (as opposed to retruths) about Alexei Navalny. For this, we dove into the Open Measures Research Dashboard, which is available only to partnered clients. Other researchers can use this and any other query to conduct research using Open Measures’ dataset via the public API (be sure to set esquery = true). 

Since all retruths on Truth Social have a “reply to ID” tag on them, we crafted the following query to exclude them from our results: 

content_cleaned:”navalny” AND NOT in_reply_to_id: *

This query generated the following graph: 

Caption: Accounts on Truth Social that authored unique posts about Alexei Navalny, excluding “re-truths.”

When looking at mentions of Navalny without retruths, we see a mostly different set of top posters. From this second graph, we can see more clearly that a significant amount of chatter related to Navalny was generated by accounts retruthing content created by others. Interestingly, one account appeared in both lists, indicating that they were generating an unusually high level of unique posts about Navalny. We decided to take a closer look at this account and its Navalny-related content. We did this by using the search query (with the account name redacted): 

content_cleaned: “navalny” AND account.username: “———”

Caption: One of the accounts most frequently posting using the term “Navalny” exhibits “burst” posting behavior, often within seconds of previous posts. Note time stamps.

Open Measures observed the account mainly copy-pasting replies to the same handful of accounts on Truth Social. We also observed the account demonstrating “burst” posting behavior – oftentimes posting the same thing multiple times in the span of just a few minutes. The account most frequently replied to “realDonaldTrump.” Despite the burst posting, Open Measures researchers did not observe any inauthentic-appearing behavior. 

Open Measures researchers also researched another top “Navalny” poster who, contrary to what may be expected, appeared to be pushing back against conservative messaging on Truth Social with regards to Navalny. This account expressed displeasure at Trump’s delayed reaction to Navalny’s death. Some comments from this account (with quoted account usernames removed) included: 

From February 16, 2024:

Take just a moment today and consider the contrast between Navalny and Trump.Courage vs cowardice.Leadership vs cheap politics.Love of country vs love of self.Kissing his wife goodbye upon arrest vs kissing Putin’s ass.

From February 18, 2024:

It’s been 48 hours and Donald Trump still has not mentioned the death of Alexei Navalny. He had time to sell shoes, but he hasn’t mentioned Navalny.

February 21, 2024:

When looking at the murder of Putin critic Alexei Navalny, Trump is NOT Navalny. Trump is Vladimir Putin. Please understand if Trump won in 2024, he would 100% arrest his critics and some will die in Jail. And MAGA will cheer their deaths. This is what we are faced with in 2024.

This account's activity is notable for being somewhat out of step with the majority of users on the platform. This information is useful to remind researchers that, while much of the content on these alt-tech platforms is explicitly right-wing, there are indeed a mix of voices engaging in conversation in these spaces. This kind of diversity of opinion found on alt-tech platforms will be an interesting line of future inquiry and worth further investigation.

Analyzing and Counting Links Shared on Truth Social

In addition to understanding who was talking about Alexei Navalny’s death on Truth Social, we were also interested in the news and media content that were shared. For this, we focused our research on the links that individuals were sharing about Navalny.

Open Measures’ Link Counter tool provides information on what domains are being posted across all of the alt-tech platforms in our collections. We wanted to see which domains were shared the most on Truth Social in posts that also mentioned Navalny from February 15, 2024 to March 5, 2024. 

Caption: Top 10 URL hosts shared in posts which contain “Navalny” on Truth Social in the month surrounding his death.

The top three sites shared were: 

• Rumble: A Canadian alternative to YouTube that Open Measures also collects data from

• The Gateway Pundit: A far-right news site that dabbles in conspiracy theories and hoaxes

• Mediaite: A political news site

It is notable that the only mainstream news outlet that appears in the top 10 domains shared during this period of time is the conservative news network Fox News, coming in at number 9. The top sites also primarily serve content in English. 

For more specificity, we took a look at the individual links being shared on Truth Social about Navalny during this time period. To do this, we toggled “Only extract URL host?” off in Open Measures Link Counter tool. 

Caption: Open Measures Link Counter tool showing which links were shared the most alongside mentions of Navalny on Truth Social.

Two links were shared in much higher volume than any others: one from Rumble and another from Mediaite. The Rumble link points to an hour-long news round-up style video titled “2.19.24: SCANDALS revealed, will not go unpunished, MSM TDS is HUGE, Navalny, Fifth Column Pray!” from the account “And We Know.” Around the 35:25 mark, the video begins its discussion of Navalny, arguing that Navalny was not a political dissident but a Western intelligence asset. 

The second most shared link was a Mediaite with the headline “Trump Calls $354 Million Fraud Fine Against Him ‘A Form of Navalny”; this is the same link that Donald Trump shared on Truth Social, again showing his impact on discourse across the platform; there is little mention of Navalny himself in the article. 

Conclusion

Our investigation found that chatter on the death Alexei Navalny within Open Measures’ Truth Social dataset had two defined peaks: one following the announcement of his death, and another following Trump’s statement on the Truth Social platform. After closely assessing Trump's activity against users' activity on Truth Social, our researchers found that Donald Trump appeared to be a major driver of conversation about Navalny on the platform (and, in the same way, is likely a major driver of many other conversations on the platform as well). 

Other accounts posting about Navalny on Truth Social revealed interesting and diverse behavior on the platform, indicating the potential need for future research on Truth Social activity. One user copy-pasted replies and engaged in short bursts of activity, while another voiced a more centrist stance than other users.

When social media platforms adopt a more hands-off approach to free speech and moderation, these platforms may provide an environment where dangerous political extremists can thrive by expanding their reach (a risk that tends to be amplified on alt-tech platforms in particular). Similarly, the relatively niche user bases of alt-tech platforms can be more easily influenced one or several major accounts on the platform (a politician, a popular influencer, one of the platform's owners, and so on). As such, Open Measures is dedicated to monitoring alt-tech platforms — to determine which accounts drive their activity and how narratives on those platforms develop and spread elsewhere — to help researchers, citizens, and journalists make sense out of complex and politically charged narratives they encounter online.